[P]hilosophy proper must, among other things, reject the idea of progress, which is sound for the sciences and the implements of philosophy. The advocates of this idea falsely believed that what comes later must supplant what comes earlier, as inferior, as merely a step to further progress, as having only historical interest. In this conception the new as such is mistaken for the true. Through the discovery of this novelty, one feels oneself to be at the summit of history. This was the basic attitude of many philosophers of past centuries. Over and over again they believed that they had transcended the whole past by means of something utterly new, and that thereby the time had finally come to inaugurate the true philosophy. This was the case with Descartes; in all modesty and with the most justification Kant held this same belief; it was held in arrogance by the so-called German idealists, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling; and then again by Nietzsche. And tragedy was followed by Satyric drama. The publication in 1910, in the first fascicle of Logos, of Husserl's article on philosophy as an exact science, in which, speaking as the most important, because supremely consistent representative of his department, he proclaimed that the definitive principles of philosophy were at last securely established, created a clear dividing line between the partisans of progress and the others. Despite all their respect for the rational discipline of this phenomenology and of Neo-Kantianism, some thinkers came out against these claims, and returned to the traditional quest for eternal truth, which is the essence of philosophy, considering that the new was questionable and not worth striving for. Yet even so, this tone of aggressive novelty survived and if I am not mistaken is only now on the wane. The idea of progress was a form in which the experience of the Primal Source was misconstrued as the historically new, because philosophy confused itself with modern science. In addition, the desire for domination, power and prestige took possession of philosophy. Philosophy is something entirely different from what it appeared to be in such deviations: ever since man became philosophically conscious, he has realized the presence of eternity in the actual. To tear oneself away from the historical fundament in favour of something new, to make use of history as a quarry, from which to take material for arbitrary interpretations, that is a road that leads into the abyss of nihilism. We must neither subject ourselves to hypostatized manifestations of the past, nor irresponsibly remove ourselves from it in the enjoyment of contemplating what has been, but above all we must not tear ourselves away from the historical fundament. But if we have done so, nihilism will, by a painful operation, bring us back to the authentic truth. Out of nihilism there was born a new fundamental approach which teaches us to take a different view of the history of philosophy. Three thousand years of the history of philosophy become as a single present. The diverse philosophical structures contain within themselves the one truth. Hegel was the first who strove to understand the unity of this thought, but he still looked on everything that had gone before as a preliminary stage and partial truth leading up to his own philosophy. But the essential thing is that we assimilate the philosophical attainments of every epoch by remaining in constantly renewed communication with the great achievements of the past, looking upon them not as transcended but as actual. If we succeed in establishing a loving contact with all philosophical thought, then we know that our present form of philosophy also stems from the Primal Source, we know how indispensable is the universal tradition, the memory without which we would sink into the nothingness of a mere moment without past and future. In our temporal transience we know the actuality and simultaneity of essential truth, of the philosophia perennis which at all times effaces time.

- Karl Jaspers